The intervention of the House of Commons in the details of the administration of the Post Office Department and the other State Departments, is by no means confined to the raising of salaries and wages. It extends to practically every kind of question that arises out of the conflicts of the interests of the State servants and the interests of the public Treasury. The intervention is due to the organized action of the "civil service unions;" and it is exercised primarily on behalf of classes of employees, but not exclusively. The latter day spirit of the civil service unions is to make the cause of the individual the cause of the class, and that brings about much intervention through the House of Commons, by the organized civil service, on behalf of individual State servants. The ancient form of intervention on behalf of the individual who had claims that were based on personal influence or family influence, on family ties, or on friendship, has been abolished. In its place has been developed intervention on behalf of the individual, prompted by the fact that the individual in question is a member of a civil service union that seeks to enforce certain ideals as to the terms and conditions that shall prevail in the public service. Of the two forms of intervention, the latter is the more pernicious and demoralizing, partly because it is--or will become--more pervasive, partly because it rests on class bribery and class corruption, as distinguished from the individual bribery and the individual corruption upon which rested the old form of intervention. Of those two forms of corruption, the bribery of classes is the more difficult to eradicate. [Sidenote: _State Employment means Life Employment_] One of the most important results of this intervention on behalf of individuals has been the establishment of the doctrine that once a man has landed in the employ of the State, he has "something very nearly approaching to a freehold of provision for life," to employ the words of the Chairman of the Select Committee on the Civil Services Expenditure, 1873.[250]